He’s referring to Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, a mediation on love and nature that arrives in Toronto theatres next week. The question is broader than that, though, and speaks to the state of current cinema.

They see matters of life and love as eternal mysteries, and in response they construct puzzle-box films that engage our curiosity and ask questions that don’t necessarily have answers. This impulse is by no means new, but the audience is; what used to be the purview of experimental film is now so common it’s like an alternate branch of the mainstream.

Two prime examples are such puzzle-box jewels as Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love, one the second feature by a promising American and the other the latest work by a masterful Iranian. Both merit careful study and something approaching awe.

Like his Sundance-winning 2004 debut Primer, Carruth’s new Upstream Color has elements of sci-fi but intentions far beyond it.

A plot synopsis hardly does justice to the film, but here’s an attempt at one that will aid viewing. I guarantee that you need not fear spoilers.

In an unnamed U.S. city (it was filmed in Dallas), a woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) is randomly targeted by a man identified only as Thief (Thiago Martins). Thief has a horrific method: he infects his victims with a drug-filled worm that blanks out memory and forces compliance, allowing full access to their lives and bank accounts.

Thief is in cahoots with a man called the Sampler, who surgically extracts the worms from the victims and puts them into pigs, who then assume some of the characteristics of the host humans. Sampler also collects and employs sound waves in methods that assist in the illicit mind-altering.

There’s a third stage in the infection, which is also the first stage, because it’s a circular process: two botanists grow rare orchids, which produce the blue chemical that Thief extracts to drug the worms.

As Amy struggles to pull herself out of the grasp of Thief and Sampler, she meets and gets involved with a man named Jeff (writer/director Carruth). He’s a financier who has also fallen prey to the worm/pig/orchid scam and who is experiencing similar life and memory trauma.

There’s more, much more. There’s emphasis on Thoreau’s bookWalden and Civil Disobedience that hints at the film’s man/nature life cycle, and also recurring symbols (mainly circles and colours) that will fascinate book scholars and semioticians.

Meanings are multiple, debatable and ultimately pointless. What really impresses about Upstream Color is Carruth’s confident navigation of this fast river of ideas, along with emphatic acting (especially Seimetz’s), vivid cinematography, ace editing and a score (also by Carruth) that’s at once triumphal and mournful.

Like Someone in Love doesn’t immediately present itself in such surreal terms. In fact, on first blush this first Japanese excursion by Kiarostami seems to be a straightforward character study, unlike his 2010 Tuscany brain teaser Certified Copy.

Closer study reveals a web of deceit, desire and possible danger. In a bustling Tokyo bar, a fragile young woman named Akiko (Rin Takanashi) is on a cell phone trying to convince her jealous boyfriend (Ryo Kase) that she’s somewhere she’s not.

The ruse isn’t working, but Akiko has no time for bickering. Turns out she’s a high-priced call girl, and the bar owner sends her on assignment through Tokyo’s kaleidoscope night to the suburban home of an elderly widowed professor named Takashi (Tadashi Okuno).

She doesn’t want to go. By day, she’s a student, and she has homework to do. She also needs to spend time with her grandmother, who is waiting forlornly for her at a Tokyo train station. But the bar owner insists, and the trip to the professor’s home includes a bravura scene where Akiko circles the train station in a cab, watching with regret as her anxious grandmother waits in vain for the reunion that isn’t going to happen.

When Akiko arrives at the professor’s home, his intentions prove to be more paternal than sexual. He’d rather serve Akiko homemade soup than take her to bed. And he insists upon driving her to school the next morning, whereupon he meets the boyfriend, who takes the old man for Akiko’s grandfather, a false assumption nobody strives to challenge.

Kiarostami’s familiar use of moving vehicles and withheld character details are very much in evidence, and so is his abiding interest in the way people tend to conceal as much or more about their true feelings as they reveal.

The jazzy Ella Fitzgerald title tune may provide a clue, and so might the classic painting by Japanese master Chiyoji Yazaki that hangs in Takashi’s apartment, which Akiko studies. Called Training a Parrot, it shows a young woman, dressed in a kimono, trying to teach a parrot how to speak.

Who is in love, and who isn’t? Who is the teacher, and who is the student? And what is meant by the suddenness of the film’s ending?

Once again, the answers aren’t obvious or even necessarily supplied, and once again it doesn’t matter. Kiarostami’s apparent simplicity masks serious complexity.

We are inspired to think deeply, on levels both conscious and subconscious.

“I don’t need any signage,” says Carruth’s assertive Jeff in Upstream Color, and the thoughtful viewer of both these puzzle-box films can only nod in agreement.

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